Gently, she collected the children’s cups. With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.
THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves and pliant branches, on their skin and in their clothes. Mr. Persichetti, standing at the top of the three steps, the borrowed truck with the new chain saw just behind him, saw Tony, his own son, moving among the fallen branches as if through a jungle. Tony wore a plastic combat helmet and carried a toy pistol. He was thirteen, three years older than the oldest Keane boy, and Mr. Persichetti wondered if he wasn’t too old for such playacting. He resolved, even before Mrs. Keane had agreed to let him do the job, that he’d get the boy to help out tomorrow afternoon, hauling the thin branches and the smaller slices of tree trunk.
He was asking twenty dollars—not an exorbitant amount. Some of the women in the neighborhood merely spoke to him from behind their storm doors, but Mrs. Keane opened hers and invited him in. He stood in the small vestibule. She wore a maternity dress with a bow at the neckline and bedroom slippers. She seemed pale and somewhat puffy, not what you’d call a good-looking woman from the start, but she had a direct and friendly manner that encouraged him to say he had been inspired by the storm to make better use of his free days. He’d been on construction crews in the army. South Pacific. He knew how to handle a chain saw and clear away trees. He’d always thought that if he was ever going to get any kind of sideline going, he wanted it to be something that got him out in the fresh air. Listening to the wind on the night of the hurricane, he’d heard the crack and snap of a falling tree and it had brought the whole thing back to him, the fields he’d cleared, the forests hauled away. One thing led to another, he said. A new chain saw, a buddy with a truck. A place in Commack where he could dump the wood. The vestibule was identical to the one in his own house, although his wife was dark-eyed and thin-faced, younger than Mrs. Keane but well finished with childbearing. Twenty dollars wasn’t a lot to ask but she, like the other women who were not so friendly, said she would have to check with her husband first.
She followed him out to the front step. It was a beautiful day, the kind that always followed such a storm. The September sky a perfect blue and the odor of dried rain still in the air. The green odor of the fallen tree as well. Mrs. Keane and Mr. Persichetti both looked toward it. The grass had been torn by the exposed roots, but the tree itself seemed beautiful in repose. They could see through the branches the children who played there, some brightly colored, others mere shadows amid the leaves. Her boys and the Persichetti boy and a dozen neighborhood children among them.
“It will be a shame to take it away,” Mrs. Keane said, as if she’d already agreed to let him do the job. “We’re the most popular place in the neighborhood.” She put her hand under her belly, the way pregnant women do, holding up the weight. Mr. Persichetti watched his son slide along the downed trunk of the tree, his silver cowboy pistol drawn. There were strings of willow leaves, still strung on their wiry branches, wrapped around his helmet.
Impulsively, Mr. Persichetti called out his son’s name, foiling an ambush (at the sound of the man’s voice, Michael Keane’s head appeared on the other side of the upended roots). He said it was time to go. The response was all in the boy’s shoulders and arms—a slow sinking. Two more boys, also in helmets, emerged from the leaves, their indignation at being called from the game tempered only by the sight of Tony’s father on the steps in his work pants and T-shirt. He was a broad, short man with muscular arms. “It’s early,” his son called back, squinting. And it was the squinting, the openmouthed squinting and the hint of contradiction in his son’s voice that turned what had been mere impulse on his father’s part into command. It was early, another two hours before dinner, and there was certainly no need for him to drive Tony home—he hadn’t driven him here—but still he said, “Get in the truck,” and bent his powerful arm. He was a night nurse at Creedmoor, the state hospital, and what he had seen there, the patients he had hauled and handled—the vibration of mad voices he had felt through bodies pressed into his arms, held against his cheek and his chest—made him quick to raise his hand to his own lucky child, smart as a whip and perfectly formed.
Tony bent his head to remove the borrowed helmet. Mournfully, he handed the helmet and the pistol to Jacob. His father went down the steps and joined him at the curb. He guided Tony to the truck with his hand on the back of his son’s neck.
(“Shoot him in the foot,” Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. “Break his legs before you let him go.”)
The truck turned and headed down the street. The boys shook off the disruption and went back to their game. Mary Keane, returning to the house, her hand under her heavy belly, the baby, as far as she could tell, sound asleep within, wondered why it was that the Persichettis had only the two, Tony and little Susan, who was Annie’s age. She felt with some certainty that it would have been to Tony’s advantage if they’d had at least one other son. (She had in mind the man’s strong hand on the back of the boy’s neck.) It benefited a child, she thought, to be forgotten once in a while. Lost in the shuffle (she would have said), benignly neglected. It reminded them they were not the center of the universe simply because they were loved by their parents. How many children, when you came right down to it (she would have said), were not loved by their parents? Never mind if the love was skillful or adept.
She picked up Jacob’s school jacket and the box of toy soldiers that had been left on the floor of the hall, but the effort sent a pain up her back—like a crack through plaster—and drained the blood from her head. She leaned heavily against the front door, put her hand on the doorknob and although her husband had said nothing of his vision of the black coach wet with rain, she caught a glimpse of it herself in that second between the moment she closed her eyes and the next one when she began a Hail Mary. The amniotic fluid was like something sun-warmed against her leg. It quickly soaked her terry-cloth slipper and then pooled on the linoleum at her feet. Her heel skidded in it a little as she slowly let go of the doorknob and carefully—a reluctant skater on a pond—got herself across the hallway, onto the living-room carpet, and across the living room, a slug’s trail of dark water behind her, and onto the couch. She still held Jacob’s coat in her hand and she threw it over the cushions before she eased herself down, praying all the while the formal prayer that held off both hope and dread, as well as any speculation about what to do next. She must have said a dozen of them—it only occurred to her after about the seventh or eighth that she should have been counting them off on her fingers—when the first cramp seized her and then she threw the prayers aside as if they had been vain attempts to speak in her high-school French. Oh look, she said. Don’t let this happen. Come on. Be reasonable.
Long before the fireman pounded at the door (or was it an angel, or a banshee, or the ghost of the other Jacob?), she had listened to the rise and fall of the wind outside. Long before her husband had woken and asked her, Who could that be? she had seen—in the silent anticipation between each long gust, in the fear that rose as the sound grew more terrible each time, as if edging toward something unbearable—the parallel between the rise and fall of the storm and the rhythm of labor. Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only s
ilence now, in the small living room. There was a baby doll and a stack of comic books in one of the chairs, a Wiffle ball beneath it. The boys’ board game with its scattered pieces was still on the rug, and there was a pale layer of dust over the hi-fi and the end tables. She wondered if the pregnancy had turned her slothful or if the room was always in some state of disorder and she was only, momentarily, seeing it clearly. Vaguely, she could hear the voices of the children in the side yard, climbing through the downed tree. It seemed to her (the pain rising again, third time) that they were not so much calling words as shining small silver lights into her ears. The gentle flash of a child’s voice—was it Jacob?—appearing here and there through the more general silence and the nausea of the clutching pain.
The phone was in the kitchen, and when she got herself up she would call her husband first, in his office. And then the operator to send an ambulance. And then one of the neighbors to come and watch the children. And then Pauline, who had promised to stay with the children when the time came, although time was supposed to have been still another month away and Pauline would sigh at the inconvenience, the altered plans. And this poor baby, so eager to be born, would emerge from the womb with unhappy Pauline ready to recount, on birthdays, at the birth of other children, at any of the innumerable occasions in her life when she was once again forced to abandon her plans, how she had just powdered her nose and put on her hat when the phone call came.
The fourth contraction seized her and suddenly she was perspiring. She heard herself cry out and then she heard the children’s voices like sparks struck from her own. And then heard a man call “Hello,” the single word across what seemed a great distance. Calmly, because the pain was once again subsiding (she recalled the rhythm of the hurricane), she turned her head toward the vestibule. It was simply what you did: you made conversation in elevators, complimented small children in strollers, looked up from your magazine to greet the stranger who took the seat beside you on a bus. You said, with simple friendliness, That’s a lovely hat, or Isn’t it cold?—because it was another way of saying here we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat. It was the habit of friendliness, a lifetime of it. Mary Keane smiled. Her dress and her son’s jacket and the slipcover on the couch beneath her were soaked and the next contraction was already gathering strength in the small of her back. Mary Keane smiled politely as Mr. Persichetti poked his head around the door to the vestibule and said, “Hello.”
He took her hand and then her pulse. He put his broad palm on her forehead and then took her hand again as her face flushed and she drew her legs up against the pain. He had returned to say the Krafts down the street had an apple tree split in two that he was planning to remove at noon tomorrow (Mr. Kraft was a teacher and since the schools were closed he was there to answer his door and to engage Mr. Persichetti on the spot). He’d come back to say he could easily toss both the willow and the apple tree into his truck, and so charge her only fifteen.
He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery string and even—she might have planned this—a turkey baster, all of which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the housekeeper his own wife was—there were crumbs on the kitchen table and stained teacups in the sink—but there was a sweetness in the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold of his arm.
Mr. Persichetti called his patients God’s mistakes. He pressed his arms around them when the need arose and sometimes felt their wailing voices in his own flesh, in his chest, against his cheek. What was in their eyes, or, more precisely, what was not, he thought of as some failure on the part of God to fully animate what He had, perhaps too blithely, made. He thought of God then, God the Father anyway (for Jesus, of course, was a different case), as somewhat cavalier in His creations. Not indifferent—Jesus was proof of that, as was Mr. Persichetti himself, who might have worked construction with his powerful arms but had instead used the GI Bill to become a nurse—only swift and bustling and unheeding, like nature itself. Like the storm. When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness, and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away, his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale legs bare, and he asked, gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded and when the contraction had passed, added, “Modesty is always the first thing to go.”
He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane.
He’d had the story from an Irish priest assigned to Creedmoor. “A sad case himself,” Mr. Persichetti said, and gently pulled the damp hem of her dress back over her thighs. For a moment he found himself incapable of remembering Mr. Keane’s face, although they’d been neighbors for perhaps ten years. Nor could he remember another conversation he’d had with this woman stretched before him now on her living-room couch, her hair damp and her eyes a kind of gray, or green. He took her hand as if she were his child, or his own wife.
“Apparently,” he said, “this Saint Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish chieftain, a pagan. But she had a beautiful Christian mother.” Gray eyes or green, he thought they were the one thing that might have made her pretty when she was young. “So the mother dies.” He paused only briefly. “When the girl’s about fourteen. And the chieftain goes crazy and tells his servants to go out and find another beautiful woman who resembled his dead wife so he can marry her.”
He paused again to touch her white lips with the wet towel. “They should be here soon,” he said softly, interrupting himself. There was a bit of mad laughter from the children outside. The sun through the lace curtains at the front window had placed a small spotlight on the arm of the sofa, just above her head. He could see by the color in her cheeks that another contraction was on the rise.
“The servants were evil,” he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurses’ station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. “They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do.” (“If you get my meaning,” the priest had said.) “But Dymphna ran off to Belgium.” He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. “Her crazy father followed her,” he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. “I guess he cut off her head.”
Mrs. Keane said, “Oh my,” but the contraction took hold and at the end of it she sobbed, “Mother of God,” which he supposed was the answer he should have given her in the first place.
Jesus and Mary, most of the saints, even the alcoholic priest who could calm an agitated patient with just the laying on of his swo
llen hands, Mr. Persichetti himself, plagued by pity—indications all that the Creator was not indifferent to the suffering He engendered, in His bustling, in His haste, but also that there would be no end to His mistakes. Mr. Persichetti knew that six weeks before its time and with a good thirty-minute ride to the hospital once the ambulance came (would it ever come?), the baby would most likely not survive, would be born with flesh and plenty of blood but underdeveloped lungs and insufficient breath. He heard the children calling to one another outside, Tony among them once again since his father was taking so long inside the house and (stinging injustice) had been wrong to drag him away in the first place, two hours before dinner. (Although Tony had quickly discovered that the earlier war game could not be recaptured; that in the twenty minutes he’d been gone, it had lost its life, lost its charm.)
Mr. Persichetti knew there were children growing in nearly every house in this neighborhood, in every borough and every town. Thousands more were being born today, being conceived—women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs. Keane herself already had three. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason’s taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God’s bustling. There was the Mother of God to turn to in prayer. There were the angels and the saints. There were the people like himself, plagued by pity the way other men were driven by ambition or greed, who would wade through the blood and the stool, the torn hair and ravaged flesh, the mad cries, to take the broken, raving thing—God’s mistake—into his arms.
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